Hundreds of giant dinosaur footprints found in Scottish lagoon

Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, UK and his colleagues stumbled across several hundred footprints in a coastal lagoon on the Isle of Skye, which they dated to the Middle Jurassic, 170 million years ago (Scottish Journal of Geology, DOI: 10.1144/sjg.2015-005).

The size of the prints – up to 70 centimetres across – suggests they were left by early sauropods. “They had a bigger footprint than T. rex,” says Brusatte. The largest creatures to ever have lived on land, these massive plant-eaters weighed around 20 tonnes, were up to 15 metres long and several storeys high.

This is the largest discovery of dinosaur footprints in Scotland, and it helps to piece together how and where these behemoths lived. “These dinosaurs weren’t swimmers but they would have been moving around knee-deep in this brackish lagoon. Maybe the plants there were a good food source or maybe they got some protection from other dinosaurs there,” says Brusatte.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Scotland’s giant dinosaur footprints”